


Hypothetically

by SidneySydney



Series: To love, and be loved in return [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Bisexual Lance (Voltron), F/M, Fluff and Angst, Galra Keith (Voltron), Gay Keith (Voltron), M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Pining Keith (Voltron), Pining Lance (Voltron), Protective Shiro (Voltron), Season 8, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-23 10:06:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17078276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SidneySydney/pseuds/SidneySydney
Summary: Lance begins to feel doubts plague his relationship with Allura. Shiro proves to be insightful. Keith proves to be...hypothetical.Note: errors still being edited out. I just wanted to post it already.Note x2: I’m open to people optioning different scenes they’d like to see extended on from season 8. I don’t rewrite exisiting scenes because I find that boring and repetitive, but if there are any scenes or ideas you want me to leapfrog from let me know!





	Hypothetically

Despite everything, despite all that Lance had come to learn and love about Allura, despite how deeply rooted he knew her kindness and bravery are, Lance had been sure that she had in fact abandoned him. And for a moment Lance’s heart had broken. And he’d asked himself, _was I still not enough_?

But of course he’d been wrong. Of course a moment later Allura had come sweeping in and thrown the two bounty hunters on their asses like sacks of sand, Lance feeling a bit giddy as he watched her do so. He blamed it on the poisoned air. Well, he did until later that evening when Allura had pulled him into bed and then fucked him into oblivion. By that point he’d decided that he simply liked being over powered by strong women. So help him?

Now though, deep into the stillness of night, Allura’s arms wound around his torso and her face pressed into the back of his neck, he feels plagued by doubts. Allura is more than he ever could have dreamed of, and he thinks maybe that’s the problem. He _still_ can’t believe it. He still feels like he’s clinging to her, afraid she’ll walk away. Afraid she’ll disappear if he even so much as closes his eyes.

Like his luck is about to run out at any second. 

He still doesn’t feel like there’s enough of him to keep her sustained. Her duties are driving her to her wits end, and Lance feels like all he can do is watch as she’s lost to them. To the Alteans. To Honerva.

His thoughts spiral and spiral and spiral until he knows that if he doesn’t get up and move, he’ll go mad. He just needs to walk it out.

Lance leaves Allura with a kiss against her temple and pulls the blanket over her shoulders. He grimaces when he notices just how bony they are. Her exhaustion is reflected in every part of her—in the bags under her eyes and in the sharpness of her cheeks. No matter what he does, she only seems to get worse.

Lance walks briskly through the endless maze of corridors of the Atlas. Someone else might get lost in them, but Lance had a knack for directions and can probably walk the entire layout with his eyes closed. He isn’t surprised when he ends up at the bridge.

He is surprised to see someone else there, though.

‘Shiro?’

The older man looks up from where he leans against the control panel of his command post. He’s in his uniform still and his eyes go wide when he sees Lance, like he’s been caught in the middle of something indecent. Lance sees that it was only his robotic arm he was focussing on though. The blue glow of the arm lights the space around Shiro like a lamp. Surrounded by the darkness like that, with only his arm lit up, Shiro looks very lonely. 

‘Oh, Lance,’ Shiro says, and straightens his position. ‘Are you okay? Coran said you should all be resting given that you spent a couple hours breathing toxic air.’

Lance walks up to join Shiro, standing side by side with his former leader. It’s then he notices Shiro is holding a faded image in his robotic hand. It’s hard to see, but it looks like him as a cadet with his arm wrapped around another boy. Shiro folds it away into his left hand and Lance feels like he wasn’t supposed to see it.

Lance leans against the control panel and says, ‘You’re definitely right. I should be resting. But my brain disagrees, and it’s hard to argue with your own brain. Thought I’d try and walk it out.’

‘I’m surprised you and Allura didn’t work yourselves into exhaustion already,’ Shiro comments, giving Lance a meaningful look.

‘Huh?’

Shiro points to his neck. Lance connects the dots and his hands fly to cover his throat, where all the evidence is laid out. It’s too late though; Shiro is already laughing.

‘Oh, shut up,’ Lance says.

Shiro gives Lance a sharp eye, but there's humour in his voice when he says, ‘Watch your tone. We might be friends but I still outrank you.’

Lance looks away and drops his shoulders. ‘Sorry.’

Shiro moves closer to Lance and settles his right hand on his shoulder. Its coldness seeps deep into his bones, but in a way that Lance finds comforting. ‘It’s okay. I know you’re under a lot of pressure at the moment. You more than anyone, I think.’

Lance lets out a breath and shuts his eyes, which are dry and irritated and only serves to make him more uncomfortable. ‘Allura is…a lot. Most of it is good. Really good. But there’s this part of me that thinks maybe I’m still not enough.’

When he opens his eyes he sees Shiro looking at him from the corner of his eye. His grey eyes glint in the light of his arm, and something regretful sits there. Then he opens his left hand and shows Lance the picture he was looking at before. ‘This is me and Adam from our cadet years. He was my fiancé. We were good together. Perfect even. Then I got sick, and the clock started ticking. So when the Kerberos mission was offered I jumped because it was my one and only chance. It’s what broke our relationship in the end, and I made that decision knowing what it would cost. I put duty above all else.’

Shiro pauses, slipping the photograph into Lance’s hand so he could have a closer look. Lance noticed the edges are singed. Shiro continues. ‘The first time we met Allura it took me a matter of seconds to know what kind of person she was. She was like me. The moment she stepped out of that pod she was at her control panel and getting a hold of the situation. She didn’t even take a moment to adjust. Like me, she puts her duty above all else. Above herself, above family and, I hate to say it, maybe one day even above you.’

Lance flinches and feels like the breath has been punched out of his lungs. There it is. The essence of it all. All so neatly laid out before him by Shiro.

Shiro notices Lance’s invisible turmoil and squeezes his shoulder. ‘Be that as it may, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you. But she was reborn into a universe at odds with itself, and at every turn it’s been up to her to save it. She’s forward thinking, she’s tenacious, she’s loyal to a fault. She’s a leader.’

Lance smiles, tracing the image of Shiro and Adam with his finger. ‘All the reasons why I fell in love with her. Ironically the reasons why I’m so afraid she’ll leave me behind.’

‘Take it from someone who has stubbornly put duty above all else his entire life,’ Shiro says, ‘people like you are the reason people like me fight so hard, why we give up so much.’ He takes the photograph from Lance when he offers it back and then, for good measure, uses the hand on Lance’s shoulder to pull him in for a brief hug. In Lance’s ear he says, ‘We have so much to learn from people like you, Lance.’

Eventually, after a little more time spent chatting, Shiro sends Lance back to bed with the threat that if he doesn’t he’ll have to spend an entire day servicing the MFEs with James. It got Lance’s ass moving faster than anything else possibly could. He hurries back with light feet, throwing Shiro’s words around in his head, but when he arrives at his bedroom door, his knees lock up. He can’t bring himself to enter. Allura will wake up when he slips back into bed, and she’ll ask him questions he knows he won’t be able to answer. He’ll get defensive and short, she’ll become impatient. They’ll argue. And that’s the last thing he needs right now.

His feet start moving further down the corridor and he isn’t surprised when he ends up in front of Keith’s room. He doesn’t knock, but taps in the code on the control panel that has the door sliding open. He steps through. The door slides shut.

Keith is turned away from the door, his blanket hooked under his chin and his knees curled towards his chest. He looks so small when he’s like this. Kosmo sleeps on the floor by his bed. Upon Lance entering the wolf lifts his nose to look at Lance, but lowers it again when his yellow eyes land on him. Keith doesn’t stir, but Lance isn’t fooled. The Paladin is the lightest sleeper of them all. A falling feather could wake him up.  

Folding his arms in front of himself, Lance crosses the room and slides to the floor beside Keith’s bed. He presses his back into the mattress and Kosmo shifts his nose so it’s pressed against his thigh. His breath his warm as it seeps through the material.

‘Hypothetically,’ Lance starts, voice hushed, ‘if you had to choose between Kosmo and a lifetime with the Marmorites all for the benefit of the universe, which would you choose?’

He hears Keith shuffle under his blankets. ‘Can I play it out?’

‘Sure.’

‘Is my mum with The Blade or with Kosmo?’

‘Kosmo. They’re a packaged deal.’

‘Okay, and Shiro?’

‘Same deal. To make this shorter and more bearable for the both of us, because I know how much you _love_ to play these things out, everyone you know and love verses the Marmorites. Choose.’

‘This sounds suspiciously like a ‘do you pull the lever?’ kind of scenario.’

‘ _Keith_ ,’ Lance hassles, tipping his head back against the bed.

Keith is silent, apart from the faint sound of his breathing. ‘I did the whole duty over family for a while,’ he starts. ‘I did it because at the time I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought I could do more good. But those months that I spent with The Blade were the worst of my life, if you exclude Shiro’s disappearances. Nothing I did seemed to amount to anything, and the whole time I felt empty. All I did was eat, sleep, shit, train, work and repeat. I quickly learnt that that life wasn’t for me.’

Lance nodded. ‘You couldn’t put duty first.’

‘I definitely tried. But in the end I realised that I’ve always followed my heart. It led me to my mum, to Kosmo, to Shiro and to you guys. Not even two years on a space whale could stop it from leading me back to Voltron. My purpose was never within the mission, it was always with you guys.’ There’s a warm weight suddenly on Lance’s shoulder, and he hears the unspoken ‘to you’ echoed in the gesture.

Lance continues. ‘Hypothetically, if I knew someone called James, and he's in love with two people—Nadia and Kinkade, let’s say—what do you think he should do? Nadia is larger than life, she’s tenacious and devoted and makes him feel like the universe is just a bit more magical than it really is. But he knows that when it comes down to it, her duty will always come first. It’s not her fault; it’s just the way the universe works. Kinkade is quiet and loyal and puts his heart’s desires above all else because he trusts it will lead him in the right direction. He makes James feel safe. James loves them both for different reasons. Okay, maybe some reasons are the same; they’re both super hot. Point is he’s in love with them both. What does he do?’

Lance can feel Keith’s warmth close behind him, can feel the slight tickle of his hair against his nape. ‘First of all, I doubt James is even capable of love,’ Keith scoffs. ‘Second, I think both Nadia and Kinkade are lucky to even be loved by James at all. In this scenario he sounds like a real great guy. But I also think Nadia needs him more than Kinkade does. She needs someone to help ground her when shit really hits the fan. Because it’s about to.’

Lance’s head falls between his shoulders and tears burn their way out of his eyes. ‘But James needs Kinkade as much as Nadia needs him,’ he chokes. ‘He can’t do this without him. He’s not strong enough.’

Keith’s forehead presses against the back of Lance’s neck and the hand on his shoulder slips around his chest to his other shoulder, where he embraces Lance’s shaking form. He doesn’t say anything. There’s nothing to say. It’s an impossible situation. Lance feels suffocated by it.

Kosmo has pressed his face onto Lance’s lap fully now, whimpering while Lance begins to lose himself to his own despair.

Lance presses his nose into Keith’s arm. ‘I’m gonna lose both of you somehow, Keith. I dunno how yet, but I can feel it. Like there’s a hole opening up inside me and everything is falling in one after another.’

Lance feels Keith’s words fall onto the back of his neck. ‘You won’t.’

‘ _I will_. I’m not enough.’

‘Lance.’ Keith’s lips brush against Lance’s skin as he speaks, right where his shoulder meets his neck. ‘You’ve always been enough.’ He leans forward and knocks the side of his face into Lance’s. There, he kisses the top of Lance’s cheek, lingering a moment before he pulls back. ‘You always will be.’


End file.
